One of the best things about being Stanley Kubrick would be that people like Scatman Crothers, who played Dick Hallorann in The Shining, would just spontaneously write songs about you and sing them to you. I feel like if that ever happened to you, your life would be complete. And no, you can’t just substitute Kanye in for Scatman or something like that. Biz Markie, maybe.

Anyway, in a 1980 interview conducted by Mick Garris, Crothers discusses Kubrick’s excessive perfectionism (as represented by the unwieldy number of takes) and then essays a rendition of a little song he composed about Kubrick during a down moment on the set of The Shining—it sounds like there were plenty of down moments to choose from.

Even more fabulously, Scatman, true to his name, actually does do some scat-singing in the song. Here are the lyrics to “Stanley (Does It All)”—Scatman was very insistent about the parentheses there.

There’s a man
Livin’ in London Town
Makes movies
He’s a world renown
Yes, he’s really got the fame
Stanley Kubrick is his name
He does it all
He does it all
I’m tellin’ y’all
Stanley does it all

He’s a writer, he directs
He produces his projects
He’s the man behind the lens
And Stanley always wins
He’s a man who looks ahead
Can make you think he raised the dead
It’s and cuts all his flicks
He’s a genius with his tricks
He does it all
He does it all

In the tradition of Portland, Oregon’s motto to “keep Portland weird,” here’s a bunch of faux-trading cards based on The Shining done up by PDX-based blog, Man is the Warmest Place to Hide. Rian Callahan, the blogger who runs this excellent 80’s horror loving site, says he created the cards simply because they didn’t exist and he thought that they should. Not only do I love the way that Callahan’s brain works, he’s also done an incredible job on the cards managing to show what looks like actual wear and tear on the edges.

Callahan says the series is an “ongoing project”, but sadly hasn’t done a new card since May of 2013. Hopefully he’s got a few more in the works because I really need to see a trading card version of Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!” scene and Danny Torrence screaming “REDRUM!” Don’t you agree? One NSFW image is included below.

Here’s a scene from The Shining where the ghost of “Delbert Grady”—the previous caretaker of the Overlook Hotel—is digitally removed. Not that we didn’t already know that Jack Torrance was losing his shit, but this tinkered with scene makes him look even more unhinged.

CineFix does a very good job here of translating the unforgettable images and motifs of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining into the halcyon days of about 1989, when the most effective hack to fix your malfunctioning cartridge was to blow into it.

The game that CineFix shrewdly chose to mimic here appears to be the old LucasFilm (later LucasArts) game Maniac Mansion—the title alone is an almost perfect recapitulation of The Shining, and the gameplay appears to have been too.

Stanley Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist—Slim Pickens turned down the role of Dick Hallorann in The Shining, eventually played by Scatman Crothers, because Kubrick refused to promise to limit his number of takes on any of Pickens’ shots to under 100.

So it’s no surprise that Kubrick gave some thought to the foreign-language versions of his movies. One of the pivotal scenes in The Shining occurs when Wendy Torrance, played by Shelley Duvall, comes upon the thick, typewritten manuscript that her husband Jack has been working on for weeks, only to find that every single page is covered with thousands of iterations of the creepy phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Kubrick understood that the power of the scene is considerably blunted if you can’t understand the text and therefore must rely on a bland, impersonal, possibly poorly translated subtitle at the bottom of the screen. So Kubrick took the time to shoot four other versions of the scene, for use in the Spanish, Italian, French, and German cuts of the movie. According to The Overlook Hotel, a website run by Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich that is dedicated to Shining ephemera and lore, “Kubrick filmed a number of different language versions of the ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ insert shot as Wendy leafs through Jack’s work. Many of these alternate language stacks of paper can be seen in the Stanley Kubrick Archive.”

Italian:
Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca
(The morning has gold in its mouth)

Spanish:
No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano
(No matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner)

French:
Un Tiens vaut mieux que deux Tu l’auras
(What you have is worth much more than what you will have)

The link provided by The Overlook Hotel is 404, and my lengthy, feverish attempts to track down pictures of these “alternate stacks of paper,” alas, came to nothing. I would love to see these stacks of paper!

I was able to track down stills of the German and Italian versions on the Internet, but I can’t vouch for their authenticity. They do look legit, though.

Dean Cavanagh is that very rare breed – a maverick whose talents have been successfully proven over several different disciplines.

He is an award-winning artist; a screenwriter and playwright, writing the highly acclaimed Wedding Belles with Irvine Welsh and the forth-coming movie version of the hit on-line series Svengali. He has also been a journalist, with bylines in i-D, NME, Sabotage Times and the Guardian. Dean is also a documentary-maker, a film and TV producer and a musician, with along list of collaborators, including Robert Anton Wilson.

Now the multi-talented Cavanagh has written and directed (with his son Josh), his first movie - the much anticipated Kubricks.

In this exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Dean talks about the ideas and creative processes behind Kubricks. How he collaborated with Alan McGee, and developed the film with his son Josh, discussing his thoughts on cinema and synchronicity, and explaining howKubricks came to be filmed over 5 days, with a talented cast this summer.

Dean Cavanagh: ‘Stanley Kubrick has always fascinated me in that he was clearly trying to convey messages through symbols, codes and puzzles in his films.

‘For me his genius was in the way he presented the ‘regular’ audience with a clear narrative structure and for those who wanted to look deeper he constructed hidden layers of subjectivity. He was clearly a magician working with big budgets in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s hard not to be intrigued by him and his oeuvre.

‘I’ve been following Kubrick researchers like Rob Ager and Jay Weidner for the last few years and I really wanted to dramatize a story based around Kubrick as an inspirational enigma. There is a wealth of material about the esoteric side of Kubrick on the net and Ager and Weidner are great places to start the journey from.’

Dean Cavanagh: ‘I’ve been writing screenplays and theatre on my own and also with Irvine Welsh since the 1990’s. Up until last year, I never really had any desire to direct a film but Alan McGee encouraged me to have a go. He offered to produce a film if I would write and direct with the emphasis being on us having total control. This was music to my ears after having mainly dealt with people who are always looking for reasons not to make a film. Alan’s credo was “just do it and let’s see what happens”. There’s a great freedom in working with him.’

Sifting through Foxtongue‘s Flickr sets—which are a goldmine, btw—I came across this rather peculiar undated vintage photo which has a “Come and play with us, Danny …for ever, and ever, and ever” vibe going on, doesn’t?

Self-taught Detroit-based sculptor Bob Causey aka Bobby C creates these incredibly realistic life-sized and scaled down busts. In an online interview with The Armchair Empire, Bobby C discusses how long it takes to make one, “Upward to 6 months for the proto, I can get my end done fast but It seems to take everyone else a bit longer for the clothes.”

You can view the finished Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) bust here. Apparently this sculpture was a wacky Christmas gift for someone named “Wendy.”

Rob Ager has no academic credentials in the realms of psychology or film making, but he clearly doesn’t need them. He has an incredible intuitive grasp of the links between celluloid and the subconscious mind. He’s not only a brilliant thinker, he’s a tenacious researcher. In this fascinating study of Stanley Kubrick’s disruption of spatial logic in order to create a sense of unease in his film The Shining, Ager gets at the heart of what makes the movie so spooky - the fact that it’s so fucking disorienting, an Escher-like maze of endless corridors drifting into infinity. A terrifying dream folding into itself. Jung would have loved this movie and Ager’s take on it.